"Meet The Republican Judge Fighting To Bail Scott Walker Out Of A Criminal Investigation"

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Judge Rudolph T. Randa

CREDIT: AP Photo/Courtesy of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin

Last Tuesday, a Republican federal judge named Rudolph Randa handed down an unusual order cutting off a criminal investigation alleging illegal coordination between several political campaigns — including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) 2012 recall campaign — and conservative groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth. Randa speckled his order with uncharacteristic rhetoric for a judge tasked with being a neutral and impartial arbiter of the law. At one point, he labels the criminal probe “a long-running investigation of all things Walker-related.” At another point, he compares efforts to reign in excessive campaign spending to “the Guillotine and the Gulag.”

Extraordinary or not, Randa’s actions in this case do fit a pattern of ideological decisions in politically charged cases:

Wrongful Conviction: Probably the most analogous case to the criminal probe he recently halted was the trial of former Wisconsin state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson, who was convicted of allegedly steering a state contract to a firm connected to the state’s Democratic governor. When a Democrat was at the center of a scandal, however, Randa handled the case very differently. Although Randa sentenced Thompson to eighteen months in federal prison, she served less than four months because the Seventh Circuit ordered her released. One Seventh Circuit judge said at oral argument that the evidence against Thompson was “beyond thin.”

Protecting Sexually Abusive Priests: In 2007, then-Archbishop of Milwaukee Timothy Dolan penned a letter to the Vatican explaining that, by transferring approximately $57 million in church funds to a separate trust set up to maintain church cemeteries, he’d achieved “an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” Six years later, Randa held that, by engaging in this accounting trick, the Milwaukee Archdiocese did indeed shield these funds from lawsuits — brought by victims of clergy sex abuse. Indeed, Randa held that the Catholic Church had a constitutional right to insulate this money from lawsuits brought by the victims of priestly sex abuse.

Blocking Access To Women’s Health Clinics: In 1994, several individuals blockaded the entrance to a women’s health clinic in Milwaukee by wedging a car into the clinic’s front entryway to prevent people from entering or leaving. Three of them even welded themselves into the car while it was being used to block the clinic. The were charged with violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Randa responded to this incident by declaring this act unconstitutional. The Seventh Circuit reversed Randa, explaining that he “went beyond [his] own authority as defined by the Supreme Court.”

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